Amazing Spider-Man # 21

Where Flies The Beetle...!

Villain: 

The Beetle

Guest Star: 

Johnny Storm, Dorrie Evans

Supporting Cast: 

Betty Brant, J. Jonah Jameson, Aunt May, Flash Thompson, Liz Allan. 

Observations:

Spins a web, any size:  The Torch and Spidey do their usual routine in which the Torch shoots fireballs at Spidey and Spidey throws web balls at the Torch. (Spider-Man claims they are “asbestos web balls”, by which he presumably just means they are fire-proof. The Beetle claims to have "asbestos armour" on page 19).

Spider-Man also flips the fireballs with ping-pong bats made of web. 

p 6 “I couldn’t win a popularity contest even if I was the only one entered! Nuts!” It isn’t clear whether losing a popularity contest to Khrushchev is worse than losing one which you are the only entrant. “Nuts!” is a fairly mild swear-word to use when no-one is listening but it’s an improvement on “suffering spider-webs”.

p 6: “He’s so cultured and down to earth…” By “cultured” I think Dorrie means “good mannered”. Although he is a straight-A student and has presumably studied music and literature, Peter has never shown any particular interest in the arts before.

“It would be wonderful if some of his poise and polish were to rub off on you” This recalls Betty Brant’s comments about Peter’s new-found inner confidence a couple of issues back. We’ve come a long way from Peter the shy wallflower. 

p8 “Well, I’ll be spider-webbed string-bean.” A string-bean could be a vegetable, a banjo player, or a thin guy. Spider-Man doesn't seem to mean anything specific by it.

“You’re probably wondering where we go from here with Spidey!” writes Stan Lee on the letters page in Amazing Spider-Man #22 “Well, if it’ll make you feel better, we’re wondering too.” Hype, of course, albeit a sort of reverse psychological hype. But there is an overwhelming sense that after Ditko effectively brought the Story of Spider-Man to a satisfying conclusion in issue #18 and #19, the comic spends three or four issues marking time searching for a new direction. The action is fun, the villains are evil, but nothing very interesting can happen to this self-confident, self-assured Spider-Man.

Where Flies the Beetle is a distinct improvement over the The Coming of the Scorpion. It follows the characteristic Ditko pattern of interweaving a number of plot lines relating to Spider-Man and Peter Parker, rather than Lee’s characteristic build up to a fight. But it doesn’t make much use of the familiar Spider-Man plot engine. Liz and Flash are barely present; Aunt May appears for literally one panel. The main soap operatic impetus comes not from Spider-Man but from his guest-star. This is the Human Torch’s ninth appearance since Amazing Spider-Man started, but we won't see him again until #77. 

When the Torch appears in Amazing Spider-Man he is generally represented as an entitled, slightly arrogant, but very competent celebrity, who Spider-Man resents because of his own relative obscurity. In this final appearance, the Torch is much more as he is in his own solo-strip in Strange Tales: a teenage high school student who happens to have a superpower. (In the early Strange Tales appearances he even had a secret identity, kind of.) Flash and Peter regard him almost as "one of the guys"; Betty doesn’t have any idea who he is. You could easily run away with the idea that he’s a fellow student at Midtown High. (Actually, he lives in Long Island with his sister and commutes to the Baxter Building.)

Continuity is vague. Jameson hasn’t changed as a result of accidentally unleashing a super-villain last month; Betty, who was angry with Peter from two-timing her with Liz (which he wasn’t) is now angry with Peter for two-timing her with the Torch's girl-friend Dorrie Evans (which he obviously isn’t). Even the partial reconciliation between Spider-Man and the Torch in issue #19 is placed on hold. It’s like we’re slipping into superhero non-time: Betty is always surprised and shocked that Peter is dating someone else; the Torch and Spidey are always feuding…

The plot is pretty much a text book romance comic: you could substitute any other characters and it would come out much the same. Doris Evans is cross because her boyfriend Johnny Storm keeps running off to be a superhero during their dates. (This was somewhat foreshadowed in Amazing Spider-Man #17.) She extracts a promise from him that he won’t “flame on” during the next 24 hours. By an astonishing co-incidence, an old Strange Tales baddie called the Beetle has just got out of jail and hatches a plan to get his revenge on the Torch. By another astonishing coincidence, Peter Parker has an entirely innocent meeting with Dorrie; but Dorrie, being a minx (like all gurls) goes out of her way to tell Johnny what a nice boy that Peter Parker is. So Johnny storms off to to tell Peter Parker to lay off his gal. 

We have seen that the Spider-Man plot-machine relies on Flash, Liz, Betty and Jonah all knowing our hero as Spider-Man and also as Peter Parker. Rather implausibly, Dorrie Evans and Johnny Storm are also brought into this mechanic: Dorrie bumps into Parker in the street and thinks he is nice, but is terrified of Spider-Man; the Torch knows Spider-Man as a fellow crime-fighter and thinks of Parker as a nobody who is hitting on his girlfriend. (The Torch doesn’t remember Peter from when he came and gave a talk at his school; Dorrie doesn’t remember Spider-Man from when he gate-crashed her party.)

And so, the inevitable confrontation between the Johnnie Storm and Peter Parker. Peter and Betty are looking in the window of a pet-shop, which is what passes for a date, when along comes the Torch and starts berating Peter. (Peter’s response to Johnny’s “do you know who I am?” is one of the best ever bits of Spider-Snark. “Sure! Either you're the Human Torch or some jerk walkin’ around in his pyjamas! Or maybe both!”) As if by magic, Flash and his cronies appear. This gives Jealous Betty the impression that Peter has been dating Dorrie behind his back. (How does Johnny know where to find Peter? And would a big-league superhero really go after a high-school kid in that way?)

Parker promised himself two months ago that he was going to stop being so self-pitying from now on: and he initially reacts to the new situation with rage (crushing bricks with his bare hands) and then sensibly decides that he doesn’t really care what Johnny Storm thinks of him anyway. However where the Human Torch is concerned, Spider-Man hasn’t sworn off acting like a dick. “If he’s jealous of Peter Parker, how would he feel if Spider-Man made a play for his gal?” 

Although much is made of Marvel Comics' popularity with teenagers, I can't help thinking that this is romance as imagined by kids who are far too young to date. No-one is looking for sex, thank you Comics Code; no-one thinks about marriage; no-one even kisses. Romance is a kind of a game, in which the main object seems to be to make the other side jealous. Men compete for women; women sulk when it looks like the men are cheating on them. In fairness, the men are mostly schoolboys, with homework, detentions and playground fights to worry about: the women often have the grown-up jobs and responsibilities.

Implied sexism apart, this is an impressively put together piece. It’s in the same farcical vein as The Return of the Green Goblin (although without any of that story’s emotional impact). Parker meets Dorrie by accident; the Torch threatens Parker because he thinks he’s hitting on her; Spider-Man goes back to Dorrie’s to needle the Torch and finds the Beetle already there; the Beetle and Spider-Man have a fight; the Beetle runs away with Dorrie; the Torch turns up, finds the place trashed, and assumes Spider-Man did it; Spider-Man chases the Beetle, the Torch chases Spider-Man, eventually the two of them join together and defeat the Beetle. It is not a vintage fight, but Ditko has some fun with the three pronged brawl: at one point the Torch flames the Beetle, the Beetle brings the ceiling down to squash the torch; and Spider-Man fall through right in between them. (Interestingly, the cover shows Spider-Man caught in the crossfire between the Torch and the Beetle, where issue #17 showed the Torch caught in the crossfire between Spider-Man and the Goblin.) 

As ever, the payoff to the fight is a bit of a let-down. It rather feels as if everyone spars and then Stan Lee declares Spider-Man the winner on points. Spider-Man catches the Beetle in his web, the Torch makes a cage out of flame, and then somehow, off stage, Spider-Man puts him into a web cocoon. The obvious moral — that Spidey and the Torch work better as a team than as opponents — is not drawn. 

In the final panels the new, non-whiny Peter Parker has a moment of insight which establishes the foundations of a “new normal” for the character. “I wonder if the world will ever acclaim me as it does others? Or am I always to go through life shunned and loathed! If only I could reveal my secret identity…if I could let people realize who I am…! …But I just don’t dare!” This is a call back to last issue when he wished he could share his secret with Aunt May, but felt that he “couldn’t take that chance”. This is going to become a major strand of the story-machine from now on: Peter Parker’s life is full of problems because of his double identity; but he cannot go public because the shock could kill Aunt May. It’s a bit of a hand-wave, but it will do.

There is nothing wrong with this issue. It’s a lot more fun than a lot of what Marvel put out in the same month. (Gregory Gideon, anyone?) and streets ahead of the Distinguished Competition. Spider-Man could have rolled along happily for decades in this format: the snarky teenager, the jealous girl-friend, endless sparring and rescuing and thief-catching. But there is no question that the temporary exorcism of whiny Peter has made Spider-Man a less complex and therefore less interesting character.

Listen Bud

A Close Reading of the First Great Graphic Novel in American Literature

by

Andrew Rilstone

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. This essay forms part of his critical study of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's original Spider-Man comic book. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

Amazing Spider-Man was written and drawn by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and is copyright Marvel Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copywriter holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Amazing Spider-Man #20

The Coming of the Scorpion

Villain

The Scorpion / Mac Gargan

Supporting Cast

Flash Thompson, Liz Allen, Aunt May, J. Jonah Jameson, Betty Brant, Ned Leeds, Dr Farley Stillwell

Observations

The page count of the story drops from 22 to 20 from this issue.

Spins A Web, Any Size — Spider-Man uses a giant web bat to distract the guy tailing him (the same kind he used to disrupt the Torch’s party in #8.)

Why does Jameson hate Spider-Man? The fact that the villain he created to destroy Spider-Man turns evil proves that it is his duty to destroy Spider-Man. 

Aunt May's Condition: For the first time, Aunt May is said to be too frail to stand the shock of finding out Peter Parker is Spider-Man. “If only she were younger…if she could stand the shock…I’d reveal my other identity! But I dare not take a chance!” This will the main rationale behind Spider-Man's dual identity for years to come. 

Peter Parker's Financial Position Peter Parker hasn't sold Jameson any photos "lately" or "for days". 

P2 “It’s no trick to follow someone silently when you’ve got the power of a thousand spiders” 

A thousand spiders is quite a lot less than the "countless spiders" he had the power of in issue #10. I don’t know why a thousand spiders are quieter than, say, one.

P3 Spider-Man is shown running along telegraph wires near his home — Ditko has realized that web-swinging in Forest Hills makes no sense.

P5 “Mr Jameson is sending me to Europe to cover the disarmament conferences.”

There was indeed an Eighteen Nation Disarmament Conference going on in Geneva at this time. (It went into recess in September '64 and started up again in July '65.) 

P5 “JFK is less than an hour away.” 

It would currently take 25 - 40 minutes to drive from Madison Ave to JFK Airport; more like 80 minutes by bus. (Neither Peter, Ned or Betty appear to have their own car.) Note that New York Central Airport had been renamed after President Kennedy as recently as December 1963.

P6 “Mutated is not the exact scientific word”. 

According to the X-Men, a mutant is by definition born with superpowers Gargan is turned into a Scorpion my means of a "serum".

P9 “I’m at the peak of my power”  

p11 “His potent Spider-strength temporally dormant.”  

“His awesome energy which is slowly returning” 

Some of the clearest confirmations that Spider-Man channels his strength from outside himself — it isn’t a physical enhancement.

P17 Note that Jameson is so worried about the Scorpion that he has changed his green tie for a red one.

“It's time to dream up another great new Spider-Man villain. But how can we possibly follow someone as awesome as Kraven?”

“How about a strong guy in a green suit that makes him look like Tigger!”

“Brilliant…but it needs that little bit extra…!!”

“A strong guy in a suit....with a robotic tale coming out of his butt!!!"

“Who got his powers because....??"

“...a mad scientist gave him a potion, because...???"

"....J.J. Jonah Jameson paid him a lot of money!!!!"

"And the twist is that a side effect of the potion is that the strong guy in the green suit with the tail coming out of his butt....????"

"....turns evil!!!!"

There are not many issues from the Lee/Ditko run that I would happily strike from the canon, but this is one of them. (*) The art and the dialogue feel perfunctory; the villain is unimaginative; no-one seems quite to be acting in character; and plot-lines introduced in the last issue are hurriedly closed off. It is hard to resist the idea that the story originally intended for #20 was shelved at the last minute, and that this is a hastily-conceived filler.

Mystery ending of Amazing Spider-Man #19
We're supposed to think it's the Green Goblin, aren't we?

If you attempt to treat the end of issue #19 and the opening of issue #20 as a continuous narrative, the problems are obvious. Peter Parker sells J. Jonah Jameson a full photographic record of Spider-Man’s fight with the Enforcers. Jameson declares them sensational, and adds “I don’t know how you got them…and I don’t care.” He cares so little that as soon as Peter leaves the room he calls up two investigative reporters and tells them to find out how Peter Parker got the photos. The first of the reporters (who smokes and wears a nicely inconspicuous purple suit) is on the job by 3.30 PM. He trails Peter Parker from school to Aunt May’s house and waits there until both Peter and May have gone to bed. He calls up Jameson, who has gone home and changed into a green bathrobe, to report that he has nothing to report.

Jameson appears to already (in the last twelve hours) have worked out a theory about the source of Peter Parker's photos, and has formed a very definite plan about what he will do if the reporter's evidence confirms it: 

"I’ve got to know for certain! And then…when I’m sure…I’ll act!”

He tells Purple Suit Guy to carry on watching the Parker house until he is relieved, which must happen early the next morning. A second reporter (who doesn’t smoke and who wears a green suit) follows Peter to school, but Peter spots him on the way home. (Presumably Green Suit Guy is less careful than Purple Suit Guy.) Quite late in the evening — after Aunt May is in bed — Parker briefly distracts him with a web-bat so he can get into the house as Spider-Man. The next day, Green Suit Guy (now identified as Mac Gargan) follows Peter to school and then to the Daily Bugle offices. (Note that Parker, knowing his is being followed, must make the journey from Queens to Madison Ave on foot or by subway: Gargan can't see him web-swinging, or the game would be up.) At the Bugle offices, Gargan, reports back to Jameson. But Jameson has changed his mind again. He doesn't care where Peter Parker’s photos come from after all!  He has decided to turn his employee into a giant scorpion instead!

Now, I think we can all agree that this is nonsense of the highest order. Jameson is a millionaire, but he isn’t a green-silk-bathrobe millionaire. And he’s definitely a “get back on the job whaddayathink I pay you for?” kind of boss, not the “Get back to your post until you are relieved” kind. And the idea that Jameson would go from “I don’t care where he gets the pictures” to “I am going to send two reporters to find out where he gets the pictures” to “I don’t care where he gets the pictures, I’m going to hire a mad scientist to turn one of my staff into a supervillain instead” in few hours doesn’t fit in with the character of J.J.J. as he’s been developed over the last couple of years.

Anyone can see (although I think I am the first person in the last half a century to come right out and say it) that Spider-Man #19 sets up one plot  — a mysterious figure in green sending agents to follow Peter Parker around the city — and Spider-Man #20 abandons the plot immediately and substitutes a lackluster “Spidey vs Some Villain” story instead. I don’t believe that Stan Lee would end one issue literally on a big question mark ("Who is the new and different menace about to enter the life of Peter Parker?”) only to reveal that he’s the not at all new and not particularly different J. Jonah Jameson 5 pages into the next one. I don’t believe that Stan or Steve would introduce the idea that Jameson had started to suspect that Parker is Spider-Man if the only resolution they could think of was “He gets bored and doesn’t pursue it.” And would Stan really have penned that “I don’t care how he does it!” bubble for Jonah if he was about to reveal that he really does care, quite a lot.  (He could comfortably have fitted: “How does he do it…! I’ve got to know…?? And I know just how to find out..!!!” in the same space.) 

Was Steve going somewhere with the Mysterious Following Guy, and did Stan veto his idea, forcing him to produce a fill-in villain in a hurry? Is it even possible that the full panel question mark — a motif which never occurs in any other Ditko/Lee comic — was drawn in after the fact to cover up a panel which hinted at the vetoed plot development? Who knows, perhaps if we could get our hands on that original artwork and steam-off the question mark, we would discover a panel in which which Bathrobe Guy turned to the reader and announced "...And so the Green Goblin will have his revenge at last!!!!!!"

So much for the inept segue. But to be honest, there isn't much else to say about this story. Farely Stillway is clearly an alchemist like Curt Connors: he makes potions that enable fish to climb trees and rats to breath underwater. (Some people say that the picture of his lab is so spooky that it makes up for the rest of the issue by itself. They are wrong.) But unlike Connors, Gargan doesn't become half-man / half-beast monster; he simply becomes really, really strong. Realizing that this isn't scorpioid enough, Stillway also magics up a prosthetic tale that Gargan can control telepathically and the single least imaginative costume of any Spider-Man enemy to date. (Credit to Ditko for drawing in a mechanism that runs from Gargan's neck to the base of his spine, largely avoiding the sense that this month’s candidate for the supervillains' hall of fame is attacking Spider-Man with a prosthetic backside.) Like the Lizard, the Scorpion somehow has "all the powers" of his totem-animal: so although his hands look exactly like anyone else’s hands, they can cut through Spider-Man’s web like a scorpion’s pincers. 

Stillway warns Gargan that the experiment may affect his brain, but Gargan doesn’t mind, because he never uses it anyway. (I paraphrase.) But the intriguing idea that we are going to end up with a thug with an insectoid mind is rapidly replaced by boiler-plate Stan Lee waffle. “His body has attained the maximum degree of superpower! His brain as been subtly altered until is standards are those of a predatory beast! He has become the living embodiment of evil!!” The Code wouldn't have allowed Satan to appear in a comic, but it is still a bit of a let down when the living embodiment of evil talks and acts very much like every other Spider-Man bad guy. ("Jameson is the only one living who knows by secret identity! With him out of the way, my secret will be safe forever! It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes!”)

The sense that no-one's heart is quite in this tale is underlined by the rather pedestrian feel of the fight scenes themselves. Spider-Man’s costume gets ripped to shreds and he is seen rather dramatically lying in a pile of wreckage, but there is no sense of there being anything particularly impressive or savage about the fight. In the first round, the Scorpion punches Spider-Man repeatedly and pushes him off the roof. In the second, Spider-Man rips the Scorpion’s tail off; and then punches him until he falls over. Even the dialogue is less sparking than usual:

“Being you’re such a glutton for punishment, I’ll make it worth your while!”

“It won't be so easy this time… now I’m ready for you!”

“A fat lot of good that’ll do you! I’m stronger than ever now…as you're gonna find out.”

“Jameson tries to find out where Parker gets his pictures from” is a good idea for a story. “Jameson sponsors the creation of a new super-villain who beats Spider-Man on the first go but loses on the second go”, not so much. The idea of J.J.J. sponsoring a villain will be handled much more interestingly in issue 25, which very sensibly pretends this one didn’t exist.

Appendix: Conjectural Timeline

Monday

? 07.30 Peter sells photos to Jameson (#19)

? 09.00 Jameson instructs reporters to trail Peter 

*15.30 First reporter (Purple Suit) at Midtown High (#19)

*1600  First reporter watching Parkers' house. (#19)

? 2100 Jameson returns home

? 22:30 (After Peter and May are in bed)  First reporter calls Jameson (#19)

Tuesday 

? 06.30 First reporter replaced by Gargan (Green suit)

? 0830 Gargan trails Peter to school.

*15:30  Parker spots Gargan outside school (#20)

?16:00 Gargan follows Parker home (#20)

? 21:00 Parker as Spider-Man trails Gargan (#20)

?22:30 Gargan calls Jameson (#20)

?23:00 Spider-Man distracts Gargan and returns home (#20)

Wed

?8.30 Gargan trails Parker to school

* 15.30 Gargan follows Parker to Bugle Offices (by public transit?)

? 16:00 Jameson reads report of Stillwell's experiments and decides to turn Gargan into a scorpion.

? 16.30 Gargan and Parker arrive at Bugle officers 

? 1700 ("A short time later") Gargan and Jameson arrive at Stillwell's lab.

? 1703 ("Moments later") Gargan drinks serum. 

(*) "The Terrible Threat of the Uncanny Tinkerer" and "Spidey Tackles The Torch", obviously. 

Listen Bud

A Close Reading of the First Great Graphic Novel in American Literature

by

Andrew Rilstone

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. This essay forms part of his critical study of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's original Spider-Man comic book. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

Amazing Spider-Man was written and drawn by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and is copyright Marvel Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copywriter holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

A Sincere But Futile Attempt To Engage With Ayn Rand (2)

Love seeketh not itself to please, 

Nor for itself hath any care, 

But for another gives its ease, 

And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair. 

So sung a little Clod of Clay 

Trodden with the cattle's feet, 

But a Pebble of the brook 

Warbled out these metres meet: 

Love seeketh only self to please, 

To bind another to its delight, 

Joys in another's loss of ease, 

And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite. 

William Blake

We have all heard of people who have spent large sums of money keeping cats and dogs alive long after the vet recommends euthanasia. We might even have said “I am sorry, but by keeping Rover alive when he can no longer bark at postmen, you are being cruel. You ought to have him put to sleep and get a new puppy." There have been tragic cases where doctors and  courts have decided that a desperately sick child ought to be allowed to die, however sad it will make his parents. One might even say the same about a very old person "I am sorry, but another operation would be cruel: you ought to let Grandpa slip away peacefully". The self-interested thing to do is sometimes to keep the suffering creature alive; the altruistic thing to do is to let their life come to its natural end. 

If we believe in the tao — if we believe in human empathy and think that other people have value and agency — then there can be more than one point of view about what constitutes a good death. People who work in hospices or geriatric wards tell us that some of the very old and the very sick find their last hours and minutes precious and wouldn’t want them taken away. Different individuals might have different feelings about this. Some of us might say “If I am ever so frail that I can’t wipe my own bum then for god sake just let me go”; others might say “If I live to be 103 I damn well want you to wheel me into the cinema for the midnight showing of Star Wars: Episode XXXIII”. 

But on Rand’s view, if the rich man chooses to keep his wife alive (even though she has long since decided it's time to quit) because he couldn’t face the grief of switching her off, he acts in rational self-interest regardless of her feelings. And if he chooses to let her die because he can’t bear to watch her suffer and would rather she was at peace then he acts in rational self-interest even if she want to soldier on for a few more months. Forsooth, if he honestly decides that he would derive more deep private joy from a world cruise, a private jet, or a younger mistress than from a long stay in a cancer ward then he would be quite justified in spending his money how he wants to.

Yes, I think that he ought not to value the jet more than the old lady; or that even if he values the plane more he ought to mortify that pleasure because helping his wife is the right thing to do. But all those oughts came from the tao. They can't be extrapolated from Rand's rational morality. 

But the great lady has one more arrow in her rational quiver. 

Rational morality, she says, tells the man to save his wife's life if, and only if, her continued existence is a necessary part of his happiness. 

"But suppose (the rich man) let (the wife) die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom mean anything to him — as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and Altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice — nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival."

I agree that this is a genuine moral dilemma which ever kind of morality you follow. It's a particular problem for utilitarians. You have a million pounds. And only a million pounds, and no way of getting another million pounds. Your wife’s operation will, by coincidence, cost a million pounds. But ten other people need operations each costing, by coincidence, a hundred thousand pounds each. And they have no way of begging or borrowing or earning that hundred thousand and obviously there is no such thing as medical insurance. And the surgeon will not work pro bono. 

Do you save your wife, or all the other wives?

It seems to be pretty clear that Rand, sincerely or as a debating tactic, is conceptualizing conventional morality as a sort of evil dark-side reflection of her own rational selfishness. Since the rational person believes that they should always act in their own interest, she affects to believe that the altruistic person always acts against their own interest — that an action is moral if, and only if, it harms the person doing it. 

But in the real world altruists — people with basic human empathy; people who are not psychopaths — think that in some cases you ought to act not only in you own interest but also in other people’s interests. And this may sometimes mean denying yourself some particular good. Often it means nothing more than sacrificing your desire to have two chocolate biscuits so everyone else can have at least one; occasionally it might mean throwing yourself on the grenade so the rest of your platoon has a fighting chance. Rand falsely concludes that it's not having the biscuit and getting blown up by the grenade which are the point of the exercise. Since her morality consists in asking "what outcome would be best for me?" she imagines that traditional morality must consist in thinking “what outcome would be worst for me?"

It is true that Jesus Christ told his followers that they should aim at being completely self-sacrificial — to give all their stuff away, to act as if they were slaves and everyone else was their boss, to always make for the least prestigious table in the restaurant. But this is a specifically Christian idea: it’s not the tao. Perhaps Rand had imbibed the idea that all morality was Christian morality and concluded that to attack morality meant attacking Christianity?

It is also true that some religions say that self-denial is sometimes good. Particular people should give up particular nice things under particular circumstances or at particular times. You might fast because it is Ramadan, abstain from chocolate because it is Lent, or give up sex because you are a monk. So it is possible that Rand thinks that because altruism and asceticism are both things which Christians approve of, altruism and asceticism must be identical?

I am prepared to bet that at least one person reading this essay has experienced a life-threatening house fire. Perhaps one of you has even been in a boat which got into difficulties and had to call out the coastguard. (There were a hundred and forty two shipwrecks in 2016.)  I do not believe that anyone in this room has ever been in the position of having to choose between their true love's life and the lives of ten strangers. But according to Rand, it is illegitimate — decadent and amoral and lazy and lethargic — to create thought experiments based on rare and unusual events. It doesn't matter if objectivism breaks down when the ship hits a lifeboat and there are three people rushing for the same iceberg, because you are never likely to encounter this situation in real life. So: why is it legitimate for Ayn Rand to invoke the fantastically unlikely circumstance of being faced with the mutually exclusive choice between saving your own spouse and saving ten other spouses in order to prove that objectivism works, but illegitimate for me to imagine myself on S.S Titanic in order prove that it doesn't?

"But Andrew you are avoiding the question."

Very well: I shall answer it directly. 

If you can, with a sufficiently complicated set of trolley cars and levers, generate a circumstance where I have to choose between saving the life of one person I love or the lives of ten people I do not care about, then I ought to save the strangers. I don't say this because I think I would have more rational happy happy joy joy with the grief of having lost a friend than with the guilt of having killed ten innocent persons. I say this because if I was the one tied to the railway line, and it was a choice between saving me and saving the ten kids whose steam train was about to careen off the edge of cliff, I think that I ought to be prepared to lay down my own life. I assume that anyone I loved would feel the same way. I think that if I were the only surgeon in the world capable of operating on ten children who would certainly die without my skill, and if someone rushed into the operating theater and said "Doctor, doctor, you wife has just been shot by a one armed man and you are the only surgeon in the world with the skill to remove the bullet and if you do not come now she will certainly die before the next commercial break" I would say "I am sorry, but I cannot come until I have saved the lives of these ten kids. Because it is the right thing to do." 

Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Deuteronomy 10:19

Rand owns that you should rescue your nearest and dearest from the shipwreck, although she frames this as selfishness rather than generosity.

She concedes that you should rescue friends from the shipwreck, although here she invokes a new value called “integrity” that she hadn’t mentioned before: if I wasn’t prepared to rescue you from the shipwreck then I had no right to call you my friend. 

She even admits that there should be a presumption towards helping strangers, because they might, at some point in the future, become your friends and be a component of your selfish, rational, personal joy and happiness. 

“The generalized respect and good will which one should grant to a human being in the name of the potential value he represents — unless and until he forfeits it….A rational man does not forget that life is the source of all values and as such a common bond among living being (as against inanimate matter) that other men are potentially able to achieve the same virtues as his own and thus be of enormous value to him.” 

This seems to leave us very much where we would have been if we had stuck with the old fashioned moral law. Prof. Lewis’s reading of the tao distinguished between a law of general beneficence and a law of special beneficence.“We should help one we have promised to help rather than another, or a benefactor rather than one who has no special claims on us, or a compatriot more than a stranger, or a kinsman rather than a mere compatriot.” Be nice to everybody, but be specially nice to people you have a special reason to be specially nice to. Objectivism seems to say very much the same thing. We ought to help our loved ones; we ought to help our friends; we ought to help strangers unless there is a good reason not too. 

But Rand drops in one rather massive qualification:

“For instance a man who values human life and is caught in a shipwreck should help to save his fellow passengers. … But this does to mean that he should spend his life sailing the seven seas in search of shipwreck victims to save.”

“Suppose one hears that the man next door is ill and penniless….One may bring him food and medicine if one can afford it (and as an act of good will, not of duty) or one may raise a fund among the neighbours to help him out. But this does not mean that one must support him from then on, nor that one must spend one’s life looking for starving men to help.” 

As usual, I don't know where her rules come from. I don't know how you get from “There is a presumption that we ought to help people in distress” to "We ought to help individuals in distress who we happen to come across, but not distressed persons in general.” The implication would be that the obligation to help someone increases the closer they are to you physically which seems to me to be neither moral nor rational.

It is true that if everybody in the world always helped people who were physically close to them, then everyone who was in trouble would always get help. But that is only useful if we have already agreed that we want to create in a world where everyone who needs help gets helped. Why do we necessarily want to create such a world — apart, obviously, from its being the right thing to do? 

A particular person might get rescued from a shipwreck and decide to change their career and become a coastguard or a lifeboat man. "I was very pleased that there was someone to fish me out of the sea when I was drowning, so I have decided to spend the rest of my life fishing other people out of the sea when they are drowning" is as far as it goes a pretty logical, rational and praiseworthy attitude. But a different person might equally well say "I am personally no sailor and no swimmer, but I was glad that someone was on hand to help me when I needed it, so I would like someone to be on hand to help other people when they need it, so I am going to give some of my money to the lifeboat service each month and go door to door selling those little flags once a year." 

But what about the impoverished neighbor? If it is rational for me to give money to Mr Smith, who is out of work; and even rational for all Mr Smith's neighbors to get together and give money to Mr Smith, why is it irrational for people in general to get together to give money to unemployed people in general? If you find an abandoned infant you should certainly take care of it. You should not necessarily neglect your own child in order to take care of it. I don't think that faced with a zero-sum choice of looking after the foundling or looking after your own child you should necessarily prefer the foundling, or that you should positively seek out abandoned children in order to neglect your own. But it might be that some of the money you might have spent on nice things for your own kids will have to go on keeping the orphan alive. And I think that is true even if the orphan was not dumped on your doorstep, but is in some other part of town or some other country. I think that some kids may have to make do with a bit less cake so that other kids can have some bread.

I don’t think the question about killing one person to save ten arises very often in real life. The one about giving your own kinds a few less sweets and video games so that someone else's kid can have basic nutrition and education comes up literally all the time.

Rand tells me that, if I want to, I can go along the street collecting money to help out Mr Smith at Number 19 who has fallen on hard times. But if I admit that I have any kind of responsibility to impoverished people and sick wives and drowning men and orphaned children who I have never met, I may be tempted to organize a city-wide or nation-wide whip-round to pay for their basic needs. And that, Rand fears, could lead to a system of general taxation, state schools and hospitals, welfare, and from there to collectivism, socialism, communism and the end of civilization as we know it.

This is what I have learned from reading Ayn Rand. 

It is a good thing for individuals to help other individuals, and even for groups of people to get together to help one person in particular. But it is a bad thing for groups of people to try to help people in general. 

Charity good, welfare bad. 

I wish I hadn’t bothered.

So: what does any of this have to do with Spider-Man?

A Sincere But Futile Attempt To Engage With Ayn Rand (1)

If I am going to talk about Steve Ditko, I suppose am going to have to try and talk about Ayn Rand. 

I know that this is a bad idea. My left wing friends are already telling me that even thinking about Rand gives her a spurious credibility. My Objectivist friends, of whom I have none, will soon be telling me that this is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect liberals to say, which proves their point...

This is not a response to the whole of Ayn Rand’s, or indeed Steve Ditko’s world view: it couldn’t possibly be. It’s really just an attempt to show how the first few chapters of The Virtue of Selfishness — particularly the essay entitled The Ethics of Emergencies — strike me. Think of it as an atheist reading through St Mark’s Gospel or a Tory reading The Communist Manifesto.

*

“I’m thru getting pushed around — by anyone. From now on I just look out for number one — that means — me!”

        Amazing Fantasy #15

I swear by swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine

        Atlas Shrugged

Rand claims to have devised or discovered a rational system of ethics. Since it is an objective fact that all human beings are alive, their first moral obligation is to stay alive. Since it is an objective fact that all human beings are conscious, their second moral obligation is to be happy. But they should only be concerned with their own life and their own happiness. I have no duty to help anyone else; no-one else has a duty to help me.

“Just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others — and therefore the man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.”

I grok that, if I don’t believe in conventional morality, or religion, or mysticism, or some great big idea like Communism or the Singularity, then all I have left to believe in is me. And I think I can also see the romantic appeal of the great objectivist man, whether it's Rorschach never compromising, even in the face of Armageddon, or Del-Boy Trotter taking nothing from the government and giving nothing to the government. I owe no man anything and no man owes anything to me. Hurrah!

What I don’t know is how you get logically or rationally from “human beings are alive” to “human beings ought to try to stay alive.” I agree that human beings do on the whole mostly try to stay alive, but I don't know how you get logically or rationally from that to "Human beings should always try to stay alive." And if, by some alchemy, “I am alive” implies “I ought to try to stay alive” I still do not understand why “You are alive” does not equally imply “I ought to try to keep you alive” — why "We are all alive" doesn't imply "We all ought to try to keep each other alive."

Even if me being alive and you being alive were mutually exclusive alternatives — say, if Titanic had just struck an iceberg and there were only one spare seat on the lifeboat — I don’t know why I ought to prefer my life to yours. I don't know why Rand's morality (I ought to preserve my own life at the cost of yours) is more rational than everyone else's morality (I ought to preserve your life at the cost of my own).

I would certainly prefer it if you decided to stop being alive and allowed me to carry on, but I don’t know how I can rationally infer, from the fact that we are both alive, that pushing you out of the lifeboat is the moral thing to do. It’s equally true that I can’t rationally demonstrate that I ought to give my place on the lifeboat to you. Without some premises to work from, I can't rationally or logically demonstrate why I ought to do anything at all. I don't know how to get from any kind of "is" to any kind of "ought".

I understand that David Hume didn't, either.

I might decide to let you have the spare place on the lifeboat for all sorts of reasons — because you have dependent kids and I don’t; or because I want history to remember me as a good guy and not a bad guy; or because it wouldn’t be British to push to the front of a queue. But that's because I have a totally irrational belief that not depriving kids of their father, achieving posthumous honour and displaying good manners are more important that mere longevity. 

I doubt that such a things as rational ethics exists, in the same way that I doubt that such a thing as vegan beef casserole exists. Why should you give the other guy your place on the life boat? Because it is the right thing to do. Why should  we refuse to drop bombs on civilians in wars? Because it is the right thing to do. Why did Valjean admit that he was the escaped convict and Champmathieu was innocent? Because it was the right thing to do. Why should you stop a burglar who runs past you in a TV studio, even if no-one is paying you? Because it is the right thing to do. 

As you are presumably aware, Prof. C.S. Lewis (who Rand, rather pleasingly, abominated) thought that "doing the right thing" meant acting in accordance with the tao. By the tao he simply meant everything which human beings have always thought are the right things to do. He wasn't interested in Chinese philosophy: he just wanted to avoid specifically Christian terms. Christians don't have the monopoly on doing the right thing.

To say that something is the right thing to do because it is part of the tao is to admit that I can't say why it is the right thing to do: it just is.  Rand will only convince me that she has come up with a rational basis for ethics if she can teach me how I ought to behave without ever appealing to the tao. And that includes explaining what she means by what that pesky little word ought.

*

All I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I would take my own neck out of the noose and put another man's into it, I could not do it.

                                 Shaw, "The Devils Disciple"

It is a fact that, in an extreme situation like a shipwreck, some people act unselfishly. They allow someone else to take their place in the lifeboat or swim into dangerous waters to prevent someone else from drowning. And some people act selfishly — save their own lives without a thought for who else perishes. And some people make a dash for the lifeboat but feel guilty about it afterwards: lots of us know what the right thing to do would be, but don't actually do it. How do we decide which group are doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing? If we ought to do unto others as we would like other to do unto us, then the group who allowed others to live did the right thing. ("Do unto others" is the whole basis of the tao.) But if morality is the same as self-interest we have to say that the person who forced his way into the boat did the right thing. Indeed, we have to say that those who sacrificed or risked their own lives acted wickedly. Billy Zane is the hero and Leo DiCapprio is the bad guy.

Rand appears to agree that this would be absurd. She argues:

1: That the question is illegitimate, and the very fact that we are asking it proves the superiority of objectivists to altruists.

2: That the rational way of behaving in a shipwreck is in any case very much like that dictated by the tao: the rational man will rescue his friends, loved-ones, and possibly even strangers.

3: But this doesn’t make any difference because emergencies are special cases where special rules apply.

Turning the argument round and attacking the moral character of the people making it is not necessarily the hallmark of a serious philosophical essay. It smacks of "Weak case: insult opposing lawyer." What bad people these altruists must be to test a new theory by examining edge-cases! Lack of self-esteem, lack of respect for others, nightmare view of existence…

“A lethargic indifference to ethics, a hopelessly cynical amorality—since his questions involve situations which he is not likely ever to encounter, which bear no relation to the actual problems of his own life and thus leave him to live without any moral principles whatever.”

On no possible view could it be true to say that altruists have no moral principals. Even by Rand’s own arguments, they have lots of moral principals — just the wrong ones. But that aside: how do you get from “altruists point to extreme cases" to “altruists have no moral principals whatsoever.”

I suppose you would have to construct an argument along these lines:

1: Altruists point to extreme cases like fires and shipwrecks to refute the idea that we have no duty to help anyone else.

2: Therefore, extreme cases like fires and shipwrecks must be the only exceptions to the general rule that we have no duty to help anyone else.

3: It is intrinsically unlikely that any individual will ever experience a shipwreck or earthquake.

4: Principals drawn from improbable circumstances have no application to probable ones.

5: Therefore any attempt to infer the correct behavior in probably circumstance from the correct behavior in an improbably one is necessarily false.

6: Therefore people who argue from extreme cases have no basis for their conclusions.

7: Since people who believe in altruism argue from extreme cases, altruists have no basis for their belief in altruism.

8: Since people who believe in altruism have no basis for their belief in altruism, they have no basis for any of their other beliefs either. 

But this doesn’t work at all. Point 1 is not necessarily true. Because I raise one example, it doesn't mean there aren't any others I could have raised. You can believe something for more than one reason. Point 4 begs the question: it might be that the same rules apply in the exceptional case as in the normal one, or it might not. And point 8 is obviously nonsense: it doesn't follow at all that if I have one false belief, all my other beliefs are false as well. 

If we accepted Rand's position, we would have to say that any argument involving a hypothetical or a thought experiment is automatically invalid: that you can only make moral judgement about specific, concrete events. (I believe that some anarchists are reluctant to state general principals for this reason: because there are no general cases, only an infinite number of unique ones.) But extreme and unlikely cases are frequently useful because they help us to visualize a question. Conscientious objectors were always asked “What would you do if a German officer were raping your grandmother?”— not because there was much chance of the German army molesting that particular pacifist’s elderly relative, but because the proposition “I will not join the army because killing is wrong under all possible circumstances” is refuted if you can come up with even one circumstance where it might be right. When asked what he understood courage to mean, Socrates asked “Well, suppose you were a passenger at sea in a terrible storm….?” Would a rational man have replied “But I am not in a terrible storm, so obviously you have to live your life without any understand of courage whatsoever. See where this 'philosophy' stuff gets you!”

But this is a distraction, because it turns out that if a group of Randian objectivists really were on a sinking ship they would be just as likely to pull each other out of the water, give up their places in lifeboats, and generally act in accordance with the tao as anybody else.

In the first place, says Rand, this rule that you should look out for yourself and not for others doesn’t apply to friends and lovers. But this isn't really an exception: when you do a good turn for someone you love, you are acting selfishly, because:  

“It is one’s own personal selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.”

Ah, so: objectivists are cynical people, choosing their friends and wives in anticipation of some tangible return — money, social status, career advancement, someone to look after the kids, invitations to the best parties, sex etc? Not a bit of it. What you get out of a loved one is “a profoundly personal, private joy” and “personal, selfish happiness”. So when you help someone else, you are really acting to preserve that “private joy” and “personal happiness”. If a rich man spends a fortune to save his wife’s life, he is not acting altruistically, but selfishly. He wants her to live because he derives happiness from her; he doesn’t want her to die because he would then be less happy than he would be if she were still alive:

"In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice." 

But all this does is re-frame altruistic actions as selfish ones: instead of saying “I will save your life because I don’t want you to die” we have to say “I will save your life because I don’t want to be sad". It might be possible, and it might also be interesting, to re-frame all moral choices in that way. You say "I donate money to feed a starving child because it is the right thing to do": I say "You donate money to feed a starving child because you selfishly dislike the sensations of guilt you experience when imagining the child starving to death." But that hasn't told us anything new about how we ought to behave. Either way, the wife gets the surgery and the child gets a bowl of rice. 

We assume that the man who pays for his wife’s operation honestly loves his wife, and will truly have less happiness and less joy if she dies than if she stays alive. But supposing he does not have those feelings? Supposing he he actually sick to death of the crabby old ratbag, is quite sure he'd be happier as a widower, but stomps up the money because it’s the right thing to do. Do we have to say that he's acted immorally? Or suppose he’s with us on that sinking ship and says “I will save my baby rather than my wife, because I honestly think that the baby is more important to my personal happiness than the woman”? Does his wife get a say? Supposing he says “I will save my mistress rather than my wife” or even “I will save my puppy rather than my baby”? Assuming that his dog really was important to his personal private joy and happiness and the baby wasn't, do we have to say that he acted in rational self-interest and therefore morally?

Or are we allowed to say “Maybe you did love your dog more than your child, but you ought not to have done”?

If we take the first line, then what set out to be rational theory of ethics turns out to mean “be guided by your emotions: do whatever will make you happy”. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, without even the qualification about harming none. This is exactly what Prof. Lewis warned us would happen. There is a certain irony about how much of our rational ethic comes down to emotions like love, joy and happiness. 

But if you take the second line — that the sensible, rational, selfish thing to do is indeed to save the lives of the people who you love but if, and only if, you love the people you ought to love and do not love the people you ought not to love — then Rand hasn’t said anything very new. Ethics is about arranging your values in the correct order — loving the most important things most; the second most important things second most; the least important things least; and the unimportant things not at all. Isn't this exactly what Aristotle told us all those months ago?

[to be continued]

Listen Bud

A Close Reading of the First Great Graphic Novel in American Literature

by

Andrew Rilstone

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. This essay forms part of his critical study of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's original Spider-Man comic book. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

Amazing Spider-Man was written and drawn by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and is copyright Marvel Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copywriter holder.

 Please do not feed the troll.